Wine has had a century of formal tasting. Olive oil has had thirty years and an accredited institute. Cheese has its consortia. Garlic — an ingredient in nearly every Italian kitchen, every day — has folklore about health and a fear of bad breath.
There was no tasting sheet. There was no vocabulary. There was no way for a producer in Liguria and a producer in Emilia to describe their garlic in terms that meant the same thing.
That is what Vampiri Italiani exists to build.
The reference sample
Every session we run opens with the same garlic: VI-001, Aglio Bianco from Delfanti, Monticelli d'Ongina.
It is not the best garlic in Italy and it is not meant to be. It is the fixed one — the sample that lets a session run in November be compared with a session run in June, and a panel in Bergamo with a panel in Imperia. Without a fixed anchor, sensory scores are private opinions with numbers attached.
VI-001 opens every panel. No exceptions.
The scale
| Criterion | Points |
|---|---|
| Visual | 15 |
| Aroma, intact clove | 15 |
| Aroma, crushed clove | 20 |
| Taste, raw | 30 |
| Taste, cooked | 10 |
| Tactile | 10 |
The weighting is deliberate and it surprises people. Raw tasting carries the most points, because raw garlic carries the most varietal information. Cooking is a great flattener: it converts, softens and homogenises, and two varieties that are clearly distinguishable raw can be nearly identical after twenty-five minutes in the oven. If you only taste garlic cooked, you are tasting the technique, not the garlic.
Aroma is split in two — intact and crushed — for a reason that is central to everything we do.
Rupture is the whole story
An intact clove of garlic is nearly silent. The pungency, the heat, the thing everyone thinks of as "garlic", does not exist inside it.
It appears the moment the cell wall breaks. An enzyme, alliinase, meets its substrate and produces allicin in seconds. Slice, and you get a little. Crush, and you get a great deal. Purée, and you get everything at once.
This is why our protocol requires a 60-second wait after crushing before aroma is assessed: allicin formation needs that window, and assessing too early means assessing a compound that has not finished being born.
It is also the single most useful thing we can tell a cook. You control garlic's intensity not by quantity but by degree of rupture and by when heat arrives — because heat destroys alliinase, and destroyed alliinase means no further allicin, whatever you do to the clove afterwards.
A whole bulb roasted intact and a clove crushed into cold oil are, functionally, two different ingredients.
Session rules
- Maximum three raw samples per session. Olfactory saturation is not a matter of willpower. Past the third raw sample the assessments stop being worth recording.
- Standardised cooking for panel work: 160 °C, 25 minutes, no oil, no salt, sealed in foil. Any seasoning is a variable, and variables are what we are trying to remove.
- Palate reset: water and unsalted crackers only. Oil is never a neutraliser. It coats the receptors and disqualifies everything that follows.
- Provenance recorded before the session starts: producer, harvest date, weeks of curing, storage conditions. If a field is missing, the session does not begin.
- A blind third-party assessor for any persistence measurement. The subject cannot judge their own persistence — adaptation makes them the worst instrument in the room.
Two branches, kept separate
The Aglioteca — our growing archive — has two distinct branches, and keeping them apart is a matter of integrity, not tidiness.
Varieties are scored on the 100-point scale against VI-001. This is where Vessalico, Voghiera, Polesano, Sulmona and the rest are documented and compared.
Forms and transformed products — black garlic, smoked, dehydrated, in oil, braided and cured — are documented on a separate descriptive sheet. They are not scored against the varietal scale, because they are not answering the same question. A black garlic and a fresh clove cannot be given the same mark any more than a grape and a raisin.
Mixing the two would make both meaningless.
What we are not
We are not a certification body, and we do not sell scores. We do not rank producers against each other for publication. Our work with producers and consortia is a valorisation partnership: we document, we describe, we hand back a sensory profile that can be used.
We are also not a joke, though we have chosen a name that lets people think so for the first thirty seconds. The name buys the attention. The method is what we do with it.